OTTAWA—Roméo Dallaire’s one-man crusade to prevent the global violence he witnessed firsthand in Rwanda has grown too demanding for him to stay on in the Senate, the former general says.

Dallaire, in announcing his retirement from the upper chamber, said on Wednesday he will be working harder than ever to prevent genocide and the use of child soldiers, even though he still suffers mentally from the ill-fated UN mission in Rwanda in which 800,000 people were killed in 1994.

“I live every day what I lived 20 years ago, and it’s as if it was this morning. You can’t walk away from the scale of destruction. Nor can you walk away from the sense of abandonment that my troops and I had in the field,” he said on Parliament Hill.

Of his own struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) arising from the Rwandan genocide, Dallaire said he was in his 14th year of therapy: “I take my nine pills a day. I live one day at a time.”

But wounds can be overcome, said the grey-haired veteran of 36 years’ military service. “I hope that the fact of being injured by an operational stress injury … doesn’t mean that we’re on our knees and we’re destroyed.”

Dallaire, who is widely regarded as a hero for his efforts to try to protect victims of genocide in Rwanda despite a lack of UN backing, said global humanitarian causes are too pressing for him now.

“I couldn’t do everything. I’m 68 years old and I have an awful lot of work ahead of me,” he explained at a packed news conference.

He’s taking on a more demanding job working with the UN and other international organizations to fight genocide, handle human rights investigations in conflict zones and limit “kids being used as weapons of war.” He plans to do PTSD research at the University of Southern California and write two more books.

At the same time, he and his associates will continue to work on behalf of wounded veterans in Canada, he said.

But he said he’s moving with a “torn heart” from a Parliament he reveres.

“Think of it. I come from east-end Montreal,” where there were seven oil refineries, copper plants and chemical companies, Dallaire said. “We never saw the leaves on trees because they were burned before they could ever come up. My father being an NCO (non-commissioned officer), we lived in wartime housing where the outside sheeting was asbestos.

“And to be able to come to this building and say that I am a participant in the process of governance of this country, from that background — I’ve never gotten over it.”

But, said Dallaire, who was named to the Senate in 2005 and whose retirement takes effect June 17, “I feel I have done my job here and I feel I have another job that is growing in importance.”

He denied the Senate spending scandal triggered his resignation. But in a separate interview he told CBC-TV the “pejorative” way the Senate has come into national focus “hits us significantly” and has been hard on senators’ morale.

Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, coming out of a luncheon, offered a tribute to Dallaire: “I want to wish him all the very best. He has led a remarkable career. I’m sure everyone is saddened to hear he is leaving but again everyone wishes him all the very best.”

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair praised Dallaire as “an exceptional man who has served Canada and worked in other countries in an extraordinary way and has dedicated his life to public service. It is a great loss to everyone that he is no longer part of public life.”

“Romeo Dallaire is a humanitarian in a class of his own,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said. “The world will continue to benefit from his leadership and service to the international community.”

Of the Senate, Dallaire said the upper chamber “is in a transitional scenario” much different from when he arrived. Senators, he said, are recognizing “internal reform” is required, but there is “no doubt” in his mind that Canada still needs a senate and that the senators should be appointed.

In other matters, he said suicides carried out by Canadian veterans weigh heavily on him and he wondered aloud if Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has adequately honoured these troubled individuals. Of the recent national day of honour for the 160 killed in Afghanistan, he said it was “a fine gesture — but, you know, that’s not the whole story. People were dying by their own hands due to that campaign.”

Dallaire is author of two bestselling books. Shake Hands with the Devil, his account of his experiences in Rwanda, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2004 and became the basis for an Emmy Award-winning documentary and a motion picture.

His 2010 book, They Fight Like Soldiers; They Die Like Children — the Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers, deals with the child-soldier phenomenon.

With files from Bruce Campion-Smith

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